Business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce (e-commerce) refers to one business selling to another business via the Internet. According to the GarnetGroup, B2B e-commerce is expected to grow from $145 billion in 1999 to more than $7 trillion by 2004, which will represent more than 7% of all sales transactions worldwide.
B2B e-commerce is carried out between companies having products/services to sell and companies desiring to purchase such products/services. The selling companies have sites on the Internet where buyers may come to shop for the seller's products/services. Typically, the seller's products/services are stored in on-line catalog databases that are made available over the Internet by catalog servers. The buyers also store desired product information in local procurement systems, which also include a catalog database that is accessed by the buyer's catalog server.
The on-line catalogs from the various seller's store different types of data in different formats, and are therefore heterogeneous systems that are incompatible with each other and with the buyer's catalog database. Therefore, buyer's must browse the product catalogs of each seller, and any desired product information from the seller's catalog is either manually typed into the buyer's catalog database or paper copies are scanned-in electronically. If the buyer fails to make a purchasing decision quickly, then the product data integrated into the buyer's catalog database may become stale and out of date due to updates that have occurred in the seller's catalogs.
Accordingly, what is needed is an improved system for accessing catalog data from heterogeneous catalog databases. The present invention addresses such a need.